On the Town with Puppetmongers' Ann and David Powell

Who Ann and David Powell, the PuppetmongersWhen Dec. 2, 11 a.m.Where Puppetmongers Studio, on the north edge of Leslieville

Stepping into the Puppetmongers’ studio is a bit like walking into a life-size tickle trunk; set against one wall are five rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves, stuffed with a glorious chaos of tools, fabrics, paints, dowels, tin, string and a marching army of the puppets all those things create.

Angle your vision slightly, though, and you’ll get a glimpse of the half-installed kitchen cabinets just to the left of the cluttered not-yet-a-lobby — the haphazard proof that both a) they have just recently moved studio spaces and b) the puppets always take precedence.

Settling into a pair of mismatched, scrounged kitchen chairs at their workbench, Ann and David Powell, the sibling pair behind the long-running puppet theatre company, glance around and plumb their memories for their studio history. It’s a rather nomadic past that has taken them from David’s Queen West apartment in the ’70s — “I paid, if you can believe this,” the animated David says, dropping to a conspiratorial staged whisper, “$150 a month. And now the kitchen is its own apartment.” — to spending the last decade staying one step ahead of Leslieville’s condo boom.

The constant search for space has given them a bit of an expert eye for what they need in a studio, but the life of a puppeteer who makes their own puppets is not without its unique pitfalls.

“One of the problems we have is that we need a place where we can make noise. There’s a lot of banging and ,” says Ann, the sanguine yin to her brother’s excitable yang. “Places want artists, but they don’t quite want our kind of art, so they tend to want to send us down to the basement, with the pipes.”

“They’re quite excited until they see we’ve got a table saw,” David chips in, “and then it’s ‘Urgghhhhhhhhh.'”

There’s actually an impressive haul of heavy machinery lined up on the back wall, but of course it fades into the background when the puppets come out. Known for their inventive use of the medium — they perform shows with everything from multiple sizes of the same puppet to a circus performed entirely with bricks — the Powell’s can’t resist putting hands on one that’s put in front of them, David showing off some of their more impressive tricks while talk turns to their current show, Cinderella in Muddy York.

A transposition of the classic story to mid-1800s Toronto, on the eve of its renaming from York, it’s a very much Canadian take, as the duo explains — the absence of Cinderella’s father is explained by his being off surveying the Western wilderness, for instance.

“We talked about where it could be set, and we kind of realized that there weren’t a lot of fairytales set in Canada,” Ann says, as David folds up an accordion-style array of trumpeters he has just finished displaying.

“Places like Kentucky and some of the other Southern states actually have a great tradition of transposing European tales,” he adds. “So the becomes Mr. King, the rich owner of the mill.”

“Yes, and so we change the prince to the son of the Lieutenant-Governor,” Ann finishes up.

This back-and-forth is quite typical of their conversation, the parallel thought processes a decades-long working relationship folding on to the unassuming camaraderie of siblings. The effect is a kind of warm embrace that manages to fill the concrete expanse of the studio, to say nothing of the stage.

“We’ve occasionally had a reviewer comment that it’s a bit odd to watch us, that it almost feels a bit voyeuristic,” Ann offers.